Facebook's Remote Logout Feature

By Adam | 14 Aug 2015 12:00:00

Any regular user of social media is likely to have seen somebody's account get hijacked. Their name might be changed, their display picture will probably get swapped for an unflattering image, if not something totally unrelated, their gender will probably change and they'll have a status that says "I look like an onion" or something else, equally as embarrassing. Everyone will think they look silly and decide that they are not very secure with their Facebook account. In a worst case scenario, it is a hacker, rather than a friend, who gets into somebody's account and then uses it to spam people links to a product (or a virus!).

Now think of how much worse the situation would be if it were your account which was compromised. No I don't mean to suggest that it's worse when things happen to you than when they happen to others, but that it would be worse for you because it wouldn't only be your personal Facebook account which would be attacked, but also that of your business! If your customers saw that your Facebook account was hijacked, they're not going to take you very seriously, are they? That's not to mention the fact that people might think that, if you're not safe and secure with your Facebook page, you might not be safe and secure with your actual website, so they might not be comfortable with you having their payment details. This would definitely happen if spam links were shared over your account.

So what can you do to avoid this? Well, these hijackings most commonly occur if you leave yourself logged in on a public computer or at a friend's house. There is a little known, but very useful, way to try and stop this from happening. If you forgot to log out of somewhere, you'll likely get that sinking feeling later on when you realise what's happened: at this time you can use Facebook’s handyremote logout feature. Assuming you realise, you can then rectify these problems as soon as you realise them and hopefully you'll realise before anybody else does! Of course, it's not fool proof, but it certainly is a very handy thing to know about. With this in mind, you can be just a little safer online.